There has been a lot of quibbling online regarding the definitive event of various generations. You know, JFK’s assassination, 9/11, etc. I’m not belittling those events, just giving subtext. In mulling over the events that have stuck with me for the last 50 years or so, I have come up with this list. I’d be interested in hearing your list, thoughts, remembrances too.
- Odd/Even Gas Days – OPEC decided to pump less oil, so there was gasoline rationing in the 1970s. The government decided that the number your license plate ended in dictated when you could buy gas – odd or even days. The lines were long. There were three gas stations around the corner from our house. I recall my dad being frustrated; this was before extended business hours and the 24-hour culture of commerce that has emerged in the USA. I think he had to work all day and then cue up for gas in the evening.
- The Bicentennial Celebration – the country turned 200 years old in 1976. There were spectacle events w/ fireworks and men in powdered wigs. And muskets. And a lot of Liberty Bell souvenirs. And a special quarter. It all seemed a little corny. And that was before I studied history in college.
- 1977’s NYC Blackout – this happened when I was 9 1/2 years old. My mother and I were walking up Rogers Avenue heading home. When there was no bus in sight, we always started walking. She had retrieved me from my grandparent’s house (my father’s side of the family) where I had been hiding out to avoid punishment for loosing some earrings at day camp. I strongly disliked the day camp and most of the Lord of the Flies aspects of my childhood. The spaces I often found myself in (school, the Police Athletic League day camp (a fine piece of copaganda) valued strength, a simple brutishness, and other skills that I lacked. When my folks and family chastised me for wanting to grow up fast, neither they nor I understood that I was not made for childhood.
Any way, my mother was punctuating our walk with a graphic description of what she was going to do to me when we got home. She was a Virgo (same birthday as Beyonce) so she always had a plan. As we looked back down Rogers, we saw the bus’ headlights and the street lights begin to trip out, block by block like slow wave. Mom instantly knew what was happening, having lived through the 1965 Blackout. She may have even pulled me closer. We boarded the bus and rode the half a mile or so to our stop. By this point the darkness was everywhere. Our neighborhood, increasingly a beachhead for newly arriving immigrants from the Caribbean, had an air of panic. As we turned from Rogers, passing the corner where a car would hit me a year or so later, onto the street where I grew up, we saw a light half way up the block. It was my dad with a lantern, out giving light to the people who were scurrying into darkened homes. I got off with a slap or two to the face. My mom had bigger things to worry about like the food in the fridge and basement freezer. The looting started that evening. I remember seeing people go in and out of the neighborhood A&P the next day, carrying out canned food and other things; the meat and dairy had been taken during the night. The second night, my dad took us out for a ride in the car, navigating the streets with no stop lights very well. I recall seeing a man removed from his bike and the thief riding off into the darkness. We ate and drank what we could. And threw away a lot of food. - The Iranian Hostage Crisis – Apparently our government over threw the government of Iran in the 1950s and a group of radical Islamists overthrew the Shah of Iran and took over the country and took some (51 to be precise) white Americans hostage (there was one Black American hostage). This crisis filled the nightly newscasts in 1979 and was a distraction from my parents divorce drama and the horrors of 7th grade. This crisis doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a nice man who wore sweaters in the White House, and paved the road to Ronald Reagan.
- Reagan Fires the Air Traffic Controllers – Our first actor/MAGA president who was a fossil of the 1950s who loved to flex his power. The Air Traffic Controllers union was unhappy w/ their working conditions and went on strike. Ronnie ordered them back to work; when they refused he fired over 11,000 of them on August 5, 1981 and barred them for from federal service for the rest of their lives. So when you see these Starbucks and Amazon unionizing drives, it’s kind of miraculous. Reagan and his minions broke American unions through an ideology of racial grievance, empty patriotism, and class warfare. As teenager, I learned not to buck the system.
- “Roger, go at throttle up” – the Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion – On January 28, 1986, I was a month or so into being 18, working in a youth center in East Harlem as part of team of City Volunteer Corp youth. We taught rudimentary computer skills to elementary and middle school kids in the predominately Hispanic neighborhood. The center was in the basement of one of the buildings in a sprawling public housing project.
I had discovered the joy of Star Trek as a high school teen and saw Star Wars in a movie theater on Flatbush Avenue. I thought it was very cool when NASA debuted the Space Shuttle on the back of a truck and then flew it across the country on a 747. Like American teens everywhere, I enjoyed the dark humor of “the space shuttle is going to blow up” jokes of the 1980s. This was before I read “The Right Stuff” and learned the history of mishaps and disasters that got American men to the moon.
I recall hearing the news about Challenger. Our team leader was showing us how to do our taxes when someone came bursting into the room and announced the news. We gathered around a small black and white television in the center’s manager’s office and watched a trustworthy newscaster man go over the sad details. Footage of teacher Christa McAuliffe boarding the shuttle soon became the narrative arc of the story. I’m not even sure if our team of young Black and Puerto Rican kids knew that Ronald McNair was onboard too. Crack, crime, and rap were increasingly how Black men were portrayed in the media and our imaginations. Our Black male team leader was a counter-balance to these negative portrayals and realities. I’ve come to understand my love for the night sky, space, and science fiction as Afrofuturism, the understanding that astronomy is a cipher for the Black freedom struggle. - The Beating of Rodney King and the LA Riots – two young Black men were lynched in NYC during the 1980s in Queens and Brooklyn – Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins. Their deaths were not called lynchings and the respectability politics of my family had me understand their deaths as mostly their fault. They made poor choices and paid the price – they shouldn’t have been where they were. Respectability politics and Reaganism did not leave my young brain unscathed. Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton character taught me many a conservative talking point. I could very easily be George Santos, slipping on an identity to gain access, favor and power. I’m deeply ashamed of blaming Black people for trying to live in the sludge of racism.
The beating of Rodney King and the subsequent LA Riots were the beginning of an awakening for me. The footage of Mr. King being beaten by those cops opened my eyes to the oppressive nature of American policing. The miscarriage of justice at the trial in Simi Valley exposed the institutional and systemic racism of the American justice system, bolstered by prejudiced jurors who saw/see the police as the thin blue line that protects them from people like Mr. King. And therefore, a country that is willing to sacrifice the civil rights of Black men for a false sense of freedom. The looting and beating of Reginald Denny was the expression of a profound frustration w/ the living conditions of Black people in Los Angeles. The LAPD is notorious. Flash forward to the death of Tyree Nicholas last month in Memphis. 32 years separates the incidents. What has changed? Do Black Lives Matter? - OJ Simpson – I was living with my aunt in my grandfather’s house (mother’s side of the family) in Clinton Hill, Bed-Sty when this drama unfolded. OJ Simpson, the articulate Hertz spokesman of my childhood was in white Ford Bronco trying to outrun the police who were seeking to arrest him for the murder of his second wife and a family friend. Say what? The trial of OJ Simpson was the penultimate racial Rorschach test of the 1990s. Reparations and Restitution are words that come to mind. A bumbling prosecution, a dazzling defense team – Cochran, Bailey, Dershowitz), and the well-earned, deep-seated mistrust of the US justice system by African Americans (see Rodney King) set the table for jury nullification. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Personally, I thought and think OJ had some part in these murders. My aunt Barbara and I had many a spirited debate. She thought he was innocent; I thought he was guilty, partly or fully. OJ is a Black man who for a long stretch forgot he was Black. I’m not sure he knows even now. His presence on Twitter is like a Saturday Night Live skit. He doesn’t seem to realize how his obituary will be put together.
- Columbine – There were mass shootings before Columbine and many after, a sad list of events and carnage. I recall a madman shooting up a McDonald’s in the 1980s in California around the same time as the Tylenol tampering. My adult years have been filled with countless examples have how unsafe our country is. And I don’t mean the “hood” – we all know poor areas are more unsafe for a wide variety of reasons.
I mean the country, the seemingly blessed space of abundance and goodness, the place of wide (violently won) spaces, of natural beauty and picnics and parades. We ain’t safe on vacation, at school, at the grocery store, nowhere.
Columbine revealed a supreme failing of American middle-class parenting. (The “white” is silent). How can children stockpile weapons and be so warped in suburbia? So angry, so rage-filled, so hate-filled? How can parents who have the benefit of knowledge, money and education be so clueless (Buffalo shooter’s parents, I’m looking at you)?
Columbine revealed the limits of the nuclear family and individualism. Ending gun violence will take a collectivist approach. We’re stuck with the carnage for the forseeable future. - 9/11 – Our oldest child was a few week’s into kindergarten and I was at home w/ a toddler, Reggie perhaps preparing to go to work. He introduced me to NPR when I was a new stay-at-home mother. WNYC and WCPN kept me company as I nursed, fed and took care of three babies between 1996 and 2006. It was on WCPN that I heard the news about plane striking one of the Twin Towers. I pictured a prop plane, small Cessna or something off-course and poorly piloted. Turning on the television that vision was popped and what came next was perhaps the most horrible thing I have seen in my life to date.
As a NYC school child I went to the Twin Towers on field trips. Might have even gone with the PAL day camp too. I remember sitting on built in benches and pressing my face against the glass and looking down, the yellow taxi cabs standing out amongst all the toy sized cars below. People were specks crossing the streets. Later, during the 1980 Transit Strike, I roller-skated in the shadow of the Towers, accompanying my aunt Dawn while she did her messenger job despite the strike. In the mid and late 80’s I sat on the Brooklyn Promenade on dates and saw the Towers from afar. Ridiculously tall, two rods of buildings amongst an impressive skyline.
Not long after turning on the television, the second jumbo jet struck the second tower. My eyes and brain struggled with what I/we were seeing. The dawning realization that something terrible was happening in my hometown. Fearing that it was perhaps the beginning of some sprawling plot (it was) that would impact my mother, and family who still lived in Brooklyn and upper Manhattan. Reggie and I stood fixated in front of the tv, tending to our second child in the most distracted way (thank goodness she was one and oblivious). We watched as one tower and then the other collapsed, the cloud of concrete and other building material darkening the downtown NYC sky. We soon heard about the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA. We heard that American Aviation was being shut down. I called my mother; I recall it took many attempts, the whole world was calling their loved ones in NYC. My mom went out and purchased an American flag. We called our oldest child’s school and Ms. Judy suggested that she was best left there until the end of the day. We shut off the television at some point. The days following filled with images of posters of the missing and now known dead. My brother Eric who had just enlisted in the Navy in June of 2001, was now part of our military’s war machine. President Bush visited his aircraft carrier during the war that followed. I’m not sure if we, our country, ever came to terms w/ our Islamophobia that truly took hold after 9/11. Or if we understand our fingerprints in the Middle East and western Asia (hello Iranian Hostage Crisis).
Now there is a new tower. I’ve only passed by in a car. I’m still amazed at what is no longer there. We were in NYC last year for 9/11. The firefighters around the corner from our hotel, wearing their dress blues, assembled to mark the moments that both towers fell and their fallen brothers. It was somber and surreal, buses still traversing 181st Street ferrying people from upper Manhattan to the Bronx, the air traffic of LaGuardia in the distance. - The Election of Barack Obama – It was so cute when our youngest would take his pacifier out when President Obama was on tv and say “Ba-whaw-ack Obama!” A little Black boy seeing a Black man as President of the United States of America was not on my lifetime bingo card. I still remember hearing President Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention and knowing that he was something special. Still, I was truly surprised as he rose up through the primary season and became the party’s nominee. When his election win was announced, I was surprised. Because I learned to imagine his success was impossible. My husband had been told he could be president when he was a boy. I used to think this was a weird pipe dream to instill in a kid. Then Obama was elected. I now tell Black kids they can be anything they want if they work hard and the stars align (luck is part of the equation).
- The Election of Donald Trump – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The election of Obama set the stage for the election of Trump. The rise of the Tea Party and echoes of Reaganism. The battle between so called “conservatism” and so called “liberalism.” Culminating in the January 6 Insurrection. The re-unleashing of racism and bigotry. A moment that seems like something out of the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
Donald Trump was known to New Yorkers as a poser and charlatan. None of us took him seriously. He was and is a 20th century P.T. Barnum, a shameless huckster who is only interested in furthering his own self-interest.
He has ushered in a new age of Know Nothings/American Nativists, people who are against cultural change, immigrants, racial minorities, women’s and LGBTQ rights. People who conspired to murder female politicians like the governor of Michigan and former Speaker of the House.
Elections have consequences. - The Death of Trayvon Martin – 2012. I’ve mis-ordered this event because I’m not certain that any event outside of having my children has made me think about the nature of Black childhood in America as much as the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin. His death was a painful reminder of how unsafe Black children are in spaces that are understood to be “white” – suburbs, neighborhoods, classrooms, campuses, etc.
I recently learned about the police shooting death of Clifford Glover in Queens in 1972. I can see the thread from Clifford to Michael to Yuself to Trayvon to Tamir to Ahmaud to Tyre. Not all “children” per se, but all within the age span space that white America sees as “young” for white men and “menace to society” for black men.
I also wrestle w/ the scourge of violence in the Black community that disproportionately impacts young Black men. Intellectually, I understand that violence as the outgrowth of institutional and systemic racism. Black life is cheap and undervalued. What is it like to know you are expendable?
Personally, I’ve seen women I know impacted by senseless gun violence in the Black community, losing innocent sons to thugs with guns. The distrust of the police and criminal justice system coupled with the gangster mentality has made too many places in the Black community unsafe. Emotionally, I know fear is an unsustainable state to live in.
I’ve come to understand that ultimately I cannot protect my son or girl children either. I can counsel them to make the best choice, avoid unsafe areas and people. To defer to police, give up material possessions if someone is trying to rob them. And to sometimes not be places where they don’t belong even while knowing that they belong everywhere.
My job is to have hope. To give hope. If Sabrina Fulton, Trayvon’s mother, can have hope, I can have hope too.
Face's Facts 